Oracle Blog

Chris Gerhard's Weblog

Saturday Mar 03, 2007

That there was a worm that successfully exploited the telnet
vulnerability in Solaris 10 running around the Internet and more
specifically within Sun last week is not news. Dave pointed out that
it would seem to indicate that the reason we don't normally have
worms and viruses running around on Solaris is not due to the lack of
interest of writers of such things. Clearly as this week showed
they are interested.

The question I have been left pondering is this:

Given that the bug was well reported,
patches were made and distributed very quickly, why were there so
many hosts that were available to be infected?

Should Solaris hosts download security patches by default? Given
that security patches are free it would seem like a good install
option to allow.